Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Betty made excuses. He was a genius like his father and his grandfather before him. That explained his weak nerves and delicate constitution; of course he broke down now and then. How could a genius survive in this imperfect world?31 If he could only relax and take things as they came. Betty was relieved that he wasn’t in Mexico now. The long trip and the attendant publicity would have been a terrible strain on his nerves. By the time he and the girls came for the Christmas holiday the following week, the tumult would be over. Until then, she and precocious “little Con” would entertain the famous young Colonel.

  Lindbergh was two hours late, and there was still no sign. All of Mexico, said one observer, was holding its breath.

  America’s Viking of the Air had taken off at Bolling Field, in Washington, D.C., under the cover of low-hanging clouds that promised to follow him straight to Mexico. As he had prepared the Spirit of St. Louis for the second time to cross thousands of miles of uncharted territory, there had been no crowds, none of the drama of the transatlantic flight. Those who observed his businesslike attention to the last details of preparation felt that his intense efficiency had robbed them of the thrill of his impending departure. He was slow and meticulous, but as the weather began to clear, he had quickened his pace. When he emerged from the hangar, he was seen to have changed from his business attire into the brown leather jumpsuit that had become his uniform. The earflaps of his aviator’s hood dangled at his chin, and a pair of goggles was pushed back from his forehead.

  He moved toward the plane, and the cameramen crept closer and closer, encircling him like small black spiders with their tripods and hoods. Afraid that he might injure them as he taxied the plane to the runway, he yelled to them to move away. “If you play ball with me, I’ll treat you fair. If you don’t, I’ll turn the other way.”

  The cameramen moved back, and Lindbergh, carrying three meat sandwiches and two quarts of water meant to last him over twenty-one hundred miles, prepared to climb into the plane.

  “Wave to us!” the photographers shouted. Lindbergh, his face calm and serious, posed obligingly as he stepped into the “big machine.”

  The long flight to Mexico City was a welcome relief after months of pit stops across the states, preaching airplane safety to skeptical crowds. He had visited eighty-two cities and flown twenty-two thousand miles, making speeches, attending dinners, and marching in parades. Now, the tropical air would rest and stretch his mind, bringing him into a sensual contact with the terrain below. For a few hours there would be no hounding by the press nor demands of petty social necessities that had beleagured him in the preceding months.32

  He believed that flying posed little danger to one who was prepared. Even if there was danger, the nearness of death excited him—focusing, even purifying, his every thought and action—so that it was like living at the crux of life and death. The beauty and freedom of flight were worth more than anything he had known on the ground below. He would rather be killed in a crash than live the “antlike days” of a frightened spectator.33

  The crowds no longer bothered him as much. Nothing could be as bad as it had been in London and Paris. Most amusing were the women—so fawning and silly, always trying to impress him. He, who had found women to be a problem all his life, was now the most coveted man in the world. He received hundreds of letters from female admirers, declaring their love and proposing marriage to the Prince of the Air. Girls were everywhere, and for the first time he knew he could have his pick. Lindbergh had never liked to date; he hated the small talk and the pretense. His childhood had taught him that intimacy meant pain. Abandonment and suffocation—the two ends of the emotional spectrum—were integral to his notions of love and marriage. He felt in control only when he was alone. Yet in recent months he had begun observing young women more carefully. His public acclaim seemed to heighten his loneliness. A wife would be someone to fly with—a friend, “a crew.”34 Every time he shook hands with a girl, the press promptly had him “engaged.” A movie company had offered him a flat million dollars for close-ups of his face during a marriage ceremony. Who the bride was didn’t matter.

  This was his second record-breaking flight, and he felt confident. The flight to Mexico City was fifteen hundred miles shorter than the distance from New York to Paris. The engine would not be overloaded, and the strength of his wings would not be tested by the calm tropical weather, yet the flight proved to be more difficult than he had expected. Unlike the northeast route to Paris, he flew southwest into the night. Fog and rain-streaked darkness followed him through Houston, Texas, and for six hundred and fifty miles he flew blind, forced to gauge his route by instruments. When he reached Tampico, on the gulf coast of Mexico, he expected to fly straight to Mexico City, two hundred and fifty miles away, but, engulfed by fog and without a plotted course, he drifted three hundred miles west to the state of Guadalajara, deep into the mountains of the Sierra Madre. Twenty-five hours into the flight he was lost, meandering over nameless territory, unmarked by rivers, railroads, and towns.35

  At precisely sixteen minutes before three, Lindbergh’s silver-winged plane dropped into view. It had taken him twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes, only six hours under his meticulously planned flight to Paris. Still, it was nothing short of a miracle, compared with the Morrows’ torturous week-long journey in a railroad car.

  Saluting the hundred and fifty thousand people who now waited in the hot sun, Lindbergh flew his plane until “it seemed to hang in the air” and then descended in a long sweeping curve over the presidential box. Dwight Morrow, it was said, was the most pleased man in Mexico.

  As if in gratitude, those on the field shouted bravos and hurled their broad-brimmed hats into the air. Unlike the Parisians, who had gouged his plane for souvenirs, these admirers took him up on their shoulders and carried him to the hangar. Instead of the ticker tape thrown by New Yorkers, the Mexicans deluged him with bouquets of flowers.

  Morrow, driving with Captain Winslow, first secretary of the embassy, in his open car to greet Lindbergh, certainly did not expect an apology. As far as he and the thousands of impassioned spectators were concerned, the flight had been perfect. Lindbergh, however, was embarrassed at being two hours late. His railroad map had failed him, and his ignorance of Spanish kept him circling the towns, mistaking bathroom signs for station stops, challenging every ounce of his piloting sense, in spite of the clearing weather and the broad daylight. It had been, he felt, a poor showing for a friend.

  The crowd, unconcerned with nuance, jumped the fences and swarmed the field, shouting “Viva Lindbergh,” and “Bravo, Lindy.” Lindbergh sat high on the rear fender of the car, just to make sure that everyone could see him. The throng on the field shouted with joy and stampeded toward the ambassador’s car, clinging to its doors and blocking its way back to the grandstand. Trapped by the crowds, Betty was terrified; people grabbed at her clothes, nearly tearing them off.36

  To Constance Morrow, the fourteen-year-old-daughter of Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow waiting at the stand, it seemed forever before the car returned. When it approached, she was nearly jammed through the railings by the photographers who rushed to see Lindbergh. While President Calles made a short speech and the mayor of Mexico City presented him with the keys, Constance kept her eyes glued on Lindbergh. Taken with the tall, sandy-haired flyer, she sent her impressions in a letter to Anne, still at Smith, preparing to leave for Mexico.37 To Anne’s amusement, Constance had enclosed a hand-drawn portrait.

  Sitting in her room at school, Anne felt no excitement at the thought of meeting Lindbergh. Elisabeth, she was certain, would thoroughly captivate him, as she did all the other boys they knew, while Anne would sit awkwardly, feeling like a fool. As usual, she would find herself alone in her room, ashamed and inadequate, eloquently rehashing the conversation before the mirror. Men brought out the best in Elisabeth but made Anne feel stupid and worthless.38

  Her only consolation was the thought of seeing her mother and father. Returning to Smith
without Elisabeth for her junior and senior years, and saying good-bye to her parents when they left for Mexico, had given Anne a taste of loneliness she had never known. And yet there was a feeling of separateness and strength she had never before permitted herself. No longer bound by her mother’s circle of vigilance, Anne relaxed and stretched beyond the edge.

  She had always resented her mother’s double standard. Betty Morrow took the liberty of having her way. She went where and when she wanted, leaving the children at home with the nanny. Anne and Elisabeth, Dwight Jr., and Con spent many lonely nights in the nursery while their mother traveled through Europe, dining and entertaining, shopping for clothes, furniture, and art. It was for Morgan and Company, her mother would say, and later, during the war, for the Military Board. But her mother needn’t have gone with her father, and she needn’t have stayed so long. Betty Morrow was the perfect executive, Anne thought; she organized her children’s lives and left.

  The truth was that Anne really didn’t know her father or her mother. They “never really talked to her,” she later said. They were constantly moving, never touching ground.

  But Christmas at home had always been different. Time stopped, and the world was reordered. Life itself seemed reconfirmed. The whole family assembled under one roof, and nothing was more important than home and one another. In October, Anne had written to her mother that Christmas away from the social mania of New York held the promise of a quiet family holiday.39

  But by December, she was beginning to wonder whether Mexico would be more of the same: dinners, parties, public events. More than ever, she would have to share her parents with others, to forgo the short moments of intimacy she treasured. Lindbergh’s arrival in Mexico the week before sounded more like the “French Revolution” than a diplomatic reception. She could not imagine her place in this brash timpani of personalities and diplomatic decorum.

  A week on the sleeper train was enough to extinguish any glimmer of excitement. Never in her twenty-two years had she been more bored or more cold. It was a bit like “dying,” she wrote in her diary.40 After boarding in New York, where she met Elisabeth and Dwight Jr., Anne had traveled to Chicago and then through St. Louis toward Laredo. The desolation and poverty of the small Texas towns seen through the window of her velvet-seated private car filled her with sadness. She was repelled by her parents’ affluence, by the “waste” and “artificialities” of their indulgent “walled garden” life, and yet she was comforted, even grateful for its insulation. How terrible to be left behind in this “savage” land of mud-built houses, she mused.41

  Elisabeth’s unaccustomed presence by her side rekindled her jealousy. Her sister’s delicately sculpted face, as smooth and translucent as fine alabaster, shone with new confidence. In the two years since graduating from Smith, Elisabeth had earned the respect of her parents. To their pleasure, she had become what they prized most: a teacher. The Morrows came from a long line of teachers, and nothing was more satisfying than passing on the tradition to their daughters. A teacher was a spiritual leader, her father had written, the finest goal of an educated woman.42

  Elisabeth pleased them so easily, just by being herself; Anne always seemed to fall short. The only thing she could do was write. But writing had always been for her more a necessity than a skill, a way of understanding people and sorting out her feelings and thoughts. She could say things on paper that she could never say to someone’s face. At Smith she had learned to value her writing as a craft. She was praised for her insight and her scholarship and was encouraged by friends and teachers to publish. She thought about becoming a writer but feared that she lacked the tenacity to carry it through. She often wondered whether she really was talented. She had a boyfriend, known as P, a friend of the family, but he was painfully conventional and predictable. She was certain he saw her only in stereotype; he didn’t seem to know who she was at all. Perhaps, like her mother, she would give up a career for the “humdrum divinity” of married life. Marriage loomed like a grave inevitability—something large and yet too small to capture the “fire” she felt inside. She who “loved Scarlet” wore “a gown of black,” she wrote in a poem.43

  Suddenly the train arrived in Mexico City. They saw bright lights and small close streets as it slid into the railway station. Finding themselves on the back platform, they watched Con leap over the tracks from behind a car. Then they fell into one another’s arms.44

  There was so much to talk about that they could barely sort it out. Everyone talked so fast, asking questions and hardly waiting for answers. Were they all right? Were they safe and well? Where was the embassy? Could they meet Colonel Lindbergh?

  If they hurried, their parents told them, they could meet him now. While their father jumped into another car, racing to see Lindbergh at the embassy, the children and their mother followed behind, hoping to catch Lindbergh before he left the reception.

  Instinctively, Anne withdrew. Something had changed. This wasn’t like home at all. Things were different, faster, out of control. The way people looked at her, the way her mother spoke—the cars, the drivers, the clothes her mother wore. Lindbergh was breaking into their family party with all his “public hero stuff,” and she didn’t like it.45

  They sped, car behind car, through the brightly lit streets of the old city, and stopped before a huge eagle-crested iron gate. Once they honked loudly, the gate opened and they approached the embassy. Anne could see a massive door and, in the distance, a stone staircase. The steps were covered with red velvet, like a carpet laid out for a royal wedding. Of course, Anne thought, Lindbergh would be “nice,” a “regular newspaper hero, the baseball-player type,” but he was certainly no one who would interest her—not of her world, not at all an intellectual.46 Besides, she disliked good-looking men—“lady-killers,” self-absorbed and inaccessible.47 Should she, she wondered, “worship Lindbergh like everyone else?”48 They tumbled out of the car, dazed and shaken, as uniformed officers stood at attention on the steps. Climbing the plush stairway between the line of soldiers, Anne whispered to Elisabeth, “How ridiculous!”49 Exhausted, at last they reached the top.

  Then Anne saw a “tall slim boy in evening dress” standing against a “great stone pillar.” He was “so much slimmer, so much taller, so much more poised than I had expected. Not at all like the grinning ‘Lindy’ pictures.”50

  Betty hurried the introductions, breathlessly pushing Elisabeth forward. “Colonel Lindbergh, this is my oldest daughter, Elisabeth.”

  From behind, Anne observed his fine-bone face and clear blue eyes. “And this is Anne,” her mother said.

  Lindbergh didn’t smile. He took her hand and bowed.

  2

  Coming Home

  Three sisters, Anne Morrow, Elisabeth Morrow, and Constance Morrow, on the steps of the American Embassy in Mexico City, December 1927.

  (Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

  The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors, and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife-woman. Without them no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power.

  —BARBARA WELTER,

  The Cult of True Womanhood

  CHRISTMAS 1927, MEXICO CITY

  Anne scampered through the halls of the embassy buildings like a girl on a school holiday. She peeked in and out of the stone-walled rooms, draped with curtains and crimson tapestries. The smell of tuberoses wafted through the windows, and the cavernous fireplaces were laden with lilies. Growing tired of the darkened rooms lit only by the sun through slatted shades, Anne climbed to the roof of the embassy residence to peer over the garden wall. She felt the searing heat rise from the streets and heard the marketplace cries of the young native boys, herding their turkeys like flocks of
sheep. She imagined herself a medieval princess in a royal tower, cloistered from the tumbledown squalor of the shanties below.1

  There were those back home who heartily agreed that the new American Embassy was a “decadent” extravagance. Several members of Congress were outraged by the appropriation of $150,000 for the neoclassic European “palace,” with its iron gate and white pillared façade. It was to them a piece of “pernicious political architecture,” a symbol of monarchy and corruption rather than of democratic equality. Nonetheless, the State Department deemed it a necessity to preserve the “dignity” of the American ambassador. America, after all, had won the Great War, and Mexico was merely the “backyard” of Texas.2 Lindbergh’s presence justified their vision.

  By the time Anne arrived, Lindbergh had been in Mexico City nearly a week. The Mexicans had kept their promise to receive him with a grandeur rivaling that of the capitals of Europe. It was Paris and London all over again. Calling him the “unaccredited Ambassador of the Air,” the parliament summoned him to address a special session. “Humanity,” said one deputy, “has taken wings.” Their countries would move together toward a common destiny, aware that war would be as destructive to the victor as to the vanquished. We are, said the minister, brothers who must rise above petty concerns, “triumphantly traveling toward the sun.”3

  They paraded Lindbergh through their streets and along the waterways, showering him with flowers and serenading him with music. Lindbergh’s straight-laced, laconic style made him all the more regal and elegant. In the seven months since his transatlantic flight, he had cultivated a public persona. Instinctively, he understood the power of his fame and leaped at the chance to mold the public’s view of aviation. He spoke with a steady, determined intensity, as though the future of flight had become his personal cause. His manner had lost some of its baby-faced naïveté; his jaw and cheekbones were angular and lean. And when he walked, he sometimes strutted, hands in pockets, leaning easily into his stride. No longer content to be led like a puppy, he walked in front of the official entourage, savvy in the ways of government ceremony and facile in his handling of the crowds.4